apple bluetooth keyboard

[Maksim Yevmenkin]

Iain,

>>i now own apple bluetooth keyboard. i had a minute to spare and tried
>>bthidd(8) and bthidcontrol(8) with the most recent changes by Markus Brueffer.
>>
>>i'm very pleased to say that apple bluetooth keyboards almost works. in fact,
>>i'm typing this email using apple bluetooth keyboard.
> 
> Max, this is excellent news because mine arrived friday and I am about to
> start working on HID support for NetBSD. Mostly this means porting bthidd
> and bthidcontrol though we have wscons/wsmux here which I hope means I can
> inject events already.

yes, i think it should be pretty straight forward on netbsd. many people 
wanted to have wscons/wsmux in freebsd as well.

>>another minor issue, which has nothing to do with, bthidd(8) or
>>bthidcontrol(8), is pairing procedure. it is not very user friendly, because
>>there is no indication as to when user should type pin code on the keyboard.
>>this can be addresses by teaching hcsecd(8) to use external processes to
>>obtain pin codes. hcsecd(8) could call external process that will display
>>dialog to the user and request pin code.
> 
> How do bluez/linux manage this? I have seen mention of a 'bluepin'
> application but have no idea how it works..

well, i do not really know about {gnome|kde}bluetooth. linux used to 
have (and maybe still is) hcid daemon that would answer pin code 
requests. hcid would call external process (i.e. bluepin) and use simple 
stdin/stdout redirection to get pin from it. bluepin was/is essentially 
a python script that displays X dialog window with pin input box and 
some buttons and waits for user to enter a pin code. bluepin prints pin 
code on stdout, hcid gets it and sends pin code reply.

thanks,
max